Nightwing

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “Okay, Doctor, let’s cut the shit for a start. We had a nurse up here who spent two years teaching me about your goddamn indicators. The indicators of those priests were, one, froth, which means their lungs were infected. Two, cyanosis, black skin, which means their lungs were so congested there was no oxygen in their blood. Three, seven men died in two days. In other words, they were killed by pneumonic plague, which is a hell of a lot more infectious than bubonic plague.”

  “What’s the difference?” Cecil asked.

  “You don’t need any fleas. Just one man with plague and a cold in his lungs so he can kill his friends with a cough. It’s about a hundred percent fatal. Right, Doctor?” Youngman added to the radio.

  The figure in coveralls took a long time answering.

  “As long as the men were dead, had stopped breathing out any bacilli, and they weren’t handled improperly, the chances of further infection are practically nil.”

  “Then it was pneumonic plague.”

  “That’s premature speculation. We’ll do autopsies, the same as we did on the boy—”

  Chee’s signal to the doctor was too late.

  “So,” Youngman glared at the Navajo, “you son of a bitch.”

  “The main thing is to avoid a panic,” Chee said.

  “. . . pathogenic signs on the boy’s body would indicate the possibility of bubonic plague,” the radio went on. “There were flea bites we suspect were vectors, points of entry for the bacilli. I must stress, he was an isolated case.”

  “Until tonight.”

  “Perhaps,” the voice conceded, “until tonight.”

  “Even eight cases don’t make an epidemic,” Chee said.

  Youngman looked at the two figures in bright coveralls, the flame thrower, the bank of floodlights and rack of ultraviolet lights, the helicopter stuffed with man-size sacks. An invasion of twentieth-century apparatus such as Shongopovi had never seen before.

  “But if it is,” Youngman said, “if it is an epidemic, Chee, you’re ready, aren’t you? That’s what interests me. You’re so goddamn ready.”

  “So? You’re lucky I’m here.”

  “Maybe.” Youngman gave the radio back. “Cecil, Joe Momoa usually makes it to the Rain Dance, doesn’t he?”

  “Never misses it. And Joe Jr. and Ben, they come in on their bikes.”

  “See them today?”

  “Nope.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “If you had any phones here—” Chee said.

  “You do,” Youngman said, “in your car.”

  Youngman, Chee, the white doctor, and the Navajo patrolman called Begay flew out to Dinnebito Wash in the second helicopter. Headlights probed the dark at 150 mph because the last radio report was there was still no answer on the Momoa phone.

  “So I’m a son of a bitch, am I?” Chee asked Youngman. “If that’s true why am I helping you?”

  “Because you’re in a corner, because you’re hiding something. Because you’re scared.”

  In the twin beams, the desert slid by as two pale tracks spotted with brush, undulating as the copter flew over a dune. Youngman tapped the pilot on the shoulder.

  “Stone chimneys coming up, better climb a little.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Climb anyway.”

  The copter rose fifty feet. A slight tilt to the aircraft swung the beam and picked up a red column of sandstone reaching to the skids. The copter hopped another fifty feet.

  Youngman had no good memories of riding in helicopters; he had no good memories of the Army. Like the Army, copters were too complicated and illogical, loud and wasteful. Sitting besides Youngman, the doctor he’d spoken to over the radio on the plaza was distributing vinyl coveralls from a box stencilled, “Center for Disease Control—Sterile Until Opened or Damaged.”

  “I don’t mind lying to you,” Chee said, “and I don’t mind being a son of a bitch. That’s what it takes. You hear me?”

  “For what?” Youngman stretched his legs as best he could.

  “To be like them. Like the whites. You’re not so dumb you haven’t figured it out yet. You don’t like it but don’t try to lie to me. You know.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah? I’m saying we’re on the same side. It’s you and me, Duran, you and me on the same side against the whites.”

  “You’re prejudiced?”

  “You’re not? Is anyone not? Whites aren’t? I’m in Houston, Phoenix, Dallas every other week and I got loads of wonderful white bankers who stand up when I come in an office. And I know that each and every one of them would rather deal with a sharp stick up the ass than me. They take me to lunch—not at their private clubs, hear—and feed me steak and lobster and when I’m gone they spit it out. They hate me to begin with and they hate me more because I make them pay. I make them pay millions. Nothing’s changed, Duran. They still want to steal it all. They want to starve us out, but they can’t do that now, Duran, and you can thank the Arabs for that. They’re running out of coal and gas and oil, and they’re running out of time. Not enough time to starve us and so they have to buy. You know what else I found out? They’re no smarter than us. But they have money and they have Washington and they keep one thing in mind: it’s them against us. If we don’t stick together, Duran, we’re dead.”

  While Chee talked, the doctor pantomimed how to get into the coveralls. Feet first. Ankles snapped tight. Air tank slung over the back. Air hose attached and hung down over the collarbone. Collar mike and earphone wired to breast pocket radio. The suit zippered from the thigh to the collar. Tape over zipper. Youngman had expected some precautions to be taken on the night flight. Nothing like this, though.

  “They know they can’t fool me. So,” Chee said, “all they can do now is go around my back. Get some opposition against me in the tribal council. Just as good, get around me to the Hopis. They’re counting on you to stab me in the back.”

  Two helicopters, that interested Youngman. One copter as a gift, that was possible. Two? Hueys were a quarter of a million dollars new. Used, they still weren’t cheap. No one gave away two Hueys, not even to Walker Chee.

  “We’re on the same team, Duran. That crap about different tribes is out. You don’t like me and I don’t like you. Tough, we’re going to have to live with it. There’s something else you have to live with. I’m the only Indian in four states, maybe the only one in the country, who can save us. Not Rain Dances, not witch doctors, not bleeding heart liberals. Me! Because I know bank statements and interest rates and bribing the right bureaucrat and because I’m a son of a bitch. The best one we have.”

  “That’s why you didn’t take me into quarantine at Ship Rock? You didn’t want me talking about an epidemic and ‘stabbing you in the back’?”

  “Now you’re being dumb again.” Chee pulled his suit on. “You can see I’m doing everything I can to stop an . . . any more cases.”

  “And getting me fired, that was the good report you were going to put in for me?”

  “That can change, Deputy. If you get on the team, there shouldn’t be any problem.”

  The ground had swelled into foothills and the copter lights cut through piñon groves and sloping meadows.

  “Time for the masks,” the doctor said.

  “Wait until Joe Momoa gets a look at us,” Chee joked. “We’ll scare him to death.”

  The rows of a piñon plantation rolled under the bay door. Then a rocky field, a stream with stones pale as eyes. Another piñon grove. A road, more piñons, an empty corral, and the Momoa house, all its lights blazing. The copter passed over the house twice before settling in a landscaped yard.

  A bat hovered over a cactus. In the moonlight, the flowers of the cactus were white and fleshy and almost fluorescent, and gave off an odor of musk. The bat thrust its nose through a soft bush of anthers to lick up nectar on its long tongue.

  “They’re back!”

  “No,” Anne
fed more brush to the fire. “He’s a cactus bat. He pollinates them.”

  “Like a butterfly,” Franklin laughed and coughed. “A desert butterfly.”

  On all fours, she blew an ember into a flame. Startled, the bat wheeled away from the cactus and into the dark.

  “How’s Henry?” Franklin pushed himself up on his elbows. “Where is he?”

  Anne had kept the fire going all day, sending a futile smoke signal into the sky. Now she wanted light. The flaring brush lit up a pile of stones about twenty yards from the van.

  “There. I buried him this afternoon while you were asleep. You’ve been asleep all day.”

  She’d noosed a gila monster earlier. She cut off the fatty tail, stuck a stake through it, and laid it in the fire. Her broken fingers were swollen and purple. Chopped cactus filled the sack she’d made from her shirt. Franklin rubbed the bristle on his chin; any other time, being alone with a young woman would have roused him like a goat. Any other time.

  “God, those stars are bright.” He let his head sink back.

  “They’re always bright. Here they’re clear.”

  “Blinding, those stars.”

  Anne picked up the last of the raw snake meat.

  “You have to eat.”

  “No.”

  “Suck on it, at least.”

  He waved her away.

  “You’re going to survive this, aren’t you, Miss Dillon? You can actually live out here.”

  “Someone spent a lot of time showing me how to.”

  “And you think someone’s going to rescue you. That Indian deputy, right?”

  She was about to tell him to shut up when she decided there was no point in lying.

  “Yes, I think he will. Maybe he’ll rescue both of us.”

  “No, this is fine with me. Funny, I was fast enough to shut the door on Claire, and now I really don’t care.”

  “You have to try.”

  “Tell me,” he twisted his face towards her, “do you forgive me for leaving my own wife to die? Do you?” He waited a moment. “No, and I don’t think anyone else would. If I die here I’m lucky.”

  Anne turned over the lizard tail. The beady skin peeled off in the fire, revealing a waxy fat lightly veined.

  Franklin pushed himself up on one elbow.

  “I saw God, you know, while I was sleeping. Well, it was a lot like this. I was out in the desert, lost, alone, and I saw a campfire. As I went towards it I could make out a man squatting, his face to the fire. He was a big man and he had a blanket or something over his shoulders. I called out and, without looking back at me, he waved me to come closer to the fire. He was cooking supper and I was hungry, so I ran to the fire. In fact, I was reaching for the food when I really saw him. He was twice as big as a man but what was most remarkable about him was his face. It was huge and covered with blood. His nose was broken, I could see that, but that couldn’t account for all that blood. Yet, he was friendly. He said I could stay. He seemed to know who I was. I asked who he was, and he said he was God. That’s all.”

  “That’s Masaw, the Hopi god. You just read about him before you came camping, that’s why you had the dream.”

  “I never did get to those books,” Franklin shook his head slowly. “Thanks, I feel better now.”

  Franklin was dying from dehydration. Anne couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t drink. The bat bites were superficial, the broken legs accounted only for pain, and she’d seen no signs of internal injuries or hemorrhaging. Still, he couldn’t keep even cactus juice down and he didn’t seem to be in agony. He was simply, deliberately, drifting away.

  For that matter, she didn’t understand why Henry had died.

  She did realize her own survival had a time limit. Her pants were hanging loosely around her hips. She no longer had the strength to walk back to Gilboa even if she spaced the journey over three nights. So she’d hold out. Youngman would come. In fact, she was positive, Youngman was searching for her already.

  “Someone’s going to find us,” she said.

  Franklin didn’t answer. He was stretched out on his back, almost relaxed, staring at the sky. Anne knelt beside him and wrung her shirt so that cactus juice dripped.

  “Suck this. Just get your mouth wet.”

  His eyes were open but light years away.

  “You don’t have to swall—”

  As her elbow touched his chest, she jumped away. She’d thought the shirt was only puffed from the position of his body; it wasn’t. She put her fingers on the center of his shirt and felt soft, spongy flesh. Anne undid the buttons and pulled the shirt open. Franklin’s sternum was swollen into a round, pink bubo. She pulled the shirt all the way open. There were even larger buboes under his armpits.

  “So bright,” he muttered.

  The front door was open. The head of an eight-point buck decorated the hall. In the living room, a chandelier with crystal pendants lit more heads, a rifle rack, oils of sporting scenes, religious samplers, Navajo rugs, and a glass case of silver jewelry.

  There was no point in calling out to the Momoas through the air masks; the men could communicate by radio only among themselves. In the airtight suit, Youngman felt clammy and warm. The men looked like visitors from another planet; Youngman felt like one. He picked up the phone.

  “It’s dead.”

  “There’s our answer,” Chee said. “Have any bad storms up here lately?”

  “Couple days ago.”

  “There’s a pole down. End of mystery.”

  “Probably.” Putting the phone down, Youngman’s foot nudged an open bottle of Pepsi from under the sofa. There was still some soda in the bottle and some had dried on the carpet. “Let’s go on.”

  The downstairs bathroom was empty and neat. In Joe Momoa’s den, on his desk, was a pile of first-of-the-month bill payments ready to be mailed. Youngman looked in an aquarium tank. The big fish looked healthy. Two small fish, half-eaten, floated on the surface. The aerator bubbled. He tapped fish food into the water.

  No one was in the kitchen. The doctor opened the copper-tinted refrigerator.

  “Food’s fresh. Not even the milk is separated.”

  The copper-tinted cabinets were polished, butcher block tables wiped free of the smallest crumb.

  “Bear meat.” Begay looked in the freezer. “That’s the way to live.”

  “Look at this.” Youngman pulled a blood-stained rag out of a trash can.

  “So?” Chee said. “That could be from anything. Maybe the bear.”

  By then, Youngman was already through the louvered doors of the laundry alcove. He opened the top of the dryer and started flinging clothes onto the kitchen floor.

  “What the hell are you up to?” Chee asked.

  “We’ll see.”

  Youngman spread the clothes over the tiled floor. Two shirts and a dress were discolored brown.

  “That could be anything, could be rust marks,” Chee said. “Right, doctor?”

  “Possible.” The doctor put the stained clothes in a sack.

  “Damn right,” Chee said. “If Joe comes in and sees this mess, he’s going to have your hide, Duran. Of course, he’ll have to stand in line.”

  They turned to a sound at the kitchen’s outside door. Youngman heard a sigh of relief over his radio, he couldn’t tell who from. Begay opened the door. A collie entered, its tail low and wagging, shuffled to an empty food bowl, and returned to the men.

  “Momoa’s?”

  “His wife’s,” Youngman said. “Joe wouldn’t let a work dog in the house any more than he’d let a horse.”

  The collie sniffed the clothes on the floor. As if it were reminded of something, the dog started whining and backing into the hall. Three or four times, the dog went back and forth between the kitchen and the hall.

  “Oh, shit,” Begay said. “What a bitch. Oh, Christ.”

  For the first time, Youngman felt a bond with the Navajo patrolman. A feeling, a certainty, that the house wasn’t empty.


  The dog led them to the second floor and along a carpeted hall to a master bedroom, where Mrs. Momoa lay peacefully dead on a king-size bed. Her dress was puffed into strange shapes from the buboes around her neck and under her arms. A jar of aspirin and a thermometer were on the night table.

  In another bedroom decorated with quarter-horse trophies they found Joe Jr. Because he was naked, they saw immediately the buboes around his groin. His forearms and the back of his neck were bandaged. The doctor turned him over and removed the bandages. There was no skin on the flesh underneath.

  “Like the Hopi boy—”

  “Shut up,” the doctor told Begay. “Bring the lamp closer.”

  “Those are like the wounds on the boy,” Youngman said.

  “I know,” the doctor snapped. “I did the autopsy. Let me . . . Very unusual. Unique. These are actually a great many craterlike wounds. Damn! They cleaned them, otherwise we’d get a little of the saliva to go by. Deputy, you’re such a hotshot, maybe you can tell me what kind of animal makes a bite like this.”

  “Bats.”

  The doctor gaped up through his visor.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Chee pushed Youngman away from the bed.

  “Whatever bit Joe Jr., the horses here, and Isa Loloma attacked them in the dark and didn’t leave any tracks on the ground. The only animal I know that flies and has teeth is bats.”

  “You ever seen a bat bite like that, ever?” Chee demanded.

  “No,” Youngman admitted.

  “Then you don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure.”

  “You’re sure about an impossibility,” the doctor interrupted. “The immediate concern here is how long ago you saw these people, Deputy.”

  “Four days.”

  “This is the most virulent form of plague I’ve ever seen, if you’re correct. If he is correct, Mr, Chee, you’ve got problems.”